I am the company IT guy. Not your IT guy.
Actors don’t “act”
90% of an actor’s work is preparation (memorization is just a tiny part of this- a big part of it is studying the scenes and figuring out the character’s realizations and decisions)
By the time you’re performing, you shouldn’t have to think about the scene or dialogue at all, but just connect with your scene partner and let them guide you through it. Acting isn’t about you. You’re not important, it’s about the moment that’s in between you and the people you’re performing with.
“acting without acting”
indeed
Read the error message. The whole thing.
This comes up even with coworkers who are allegedly senior software developers.
“It’s just a white page it’s not working”
“Ok well what does the console say? Network requests?”
“403?”
“Ok now what’s in the response body?”
“The what?”
"Click on it. Then response "
"It says I don’t have permission to view this page "
“Do you have permission to view this page?”
“…no.”
I’ve had this and similar conversations far too many times, I keep professional but holy shit, and then when they do get a call going with a screen share they zoom past the error every. Single. Time.
I literally once got an email from another engineer using our internal tool at the big tech company I used to work for which said something like, “the page isn’t working. Please help. Attached screenshot of error.” The attached screenshot showed the error message, “Your authentication token has expired. Please refresh the page.”
I emailed him back, “oh yeah, that happens when your authentication token expires. Try refreshing the page.”
He emailed me back, “that worked, thanks!”
(For anyone wondering, no, we can’t refresh the page for the user, because they might have unsaved data on it.)
“What does the error message say?”
“I already closed it. Those things are always gibberish”
“Sorry, I cannot help you without the message.”
Close ticket.
Yep, so many clients: I have this problem and an error pops up, I need immediate help.
Me: Ok send me the data and the error log, and a description of what it is telling you on screen.
Client: I forget what it said, i didn’t save the log, And i needed to keep working so I deleted the file and started again.
OR
Client: My set of files is doing this, and giving me this specific error.
Me: Ah OK, that is a known issue, close all the fikes and open the top level only, open each sub fike one by one till the error pops up, that will be the culprit so run this clean up tool on that file only.
Crickets
Week later, Client : Im having that same error again, can you help?
Me: That cleanup tool should have fixed it.
Client: I didn’t have time to do those steps so I just kept working as is.
me: hopefully a gangster shoots me in a drive by crossfire on the way home.
“That’s fine, when you have the time, run the tool I sent you, it takes 30 seconds and should solve your issue!”
I wish that worked. Rather than spend an hour diagnosing which file is causing the error, they would rather struggle with it crashing for a week.
Yep, but that is their problem, I have it logged that I gave them the tool with instructions on how to use it, with them dismissing it, even when I followed up on it.
I won’t work myself up over a user who is not interested in solving their issue.
Now obviously in real life I would remote in and run the tool for them, but there have been time when they have been unwilling to do that due to some pointless reason, that’s fine, I have logs showing that I tried.
Infosec, offensive security.
No I can’t get into your Ex’s social media.
Which actually means it would probably end up being a multi-stage multi-day engagement that would require cross discipline techniques and for me to commit multiple felonies across several different, state lines, over telecommunications lines, international borders, not to mention how many three letter agencies, all so you can see who he’s fucking now.
Can I what? No.
Space is hard. You’re strapping something inside a big tube with basically directed explosives at the bottom, hoping it survives the trip, then subjecting it to constant radiation, huge temperature swings, and other brutal environmental factors like micrometeoroids. Just because we’ve been sending satellites and people up to space for nearly 70 years doesn’t mean it’s gotten easier; we’re just better at knowing what to expect so we can test for it. Failures in rockets or satellites or even manned spacecraft are going to happen as much as we work to prevent them.
Your job must be pretty cool.
You beat me to this comment
I feel like most people know that rocket science is hard.
Well, It’s not exactly brain surgery.
Still studying, but I often see people think that WiFi = Internet.
Thankfully, some of them at least acknowledge existence of “Exclamation mark WiFi”.
What is “Exclamation mark WiFi?”
!Wifi = not-wifi = there’s no wifi, there’s no internet! 😱
there’s no wifi
Wifi is a lie! screams, starts looting
WiFi icon with exclamation mark (no internet access).
Just because I’m an IT guy, it doesn’t mean I know why your laptop is slow.
I mean if their hardride isn’t full, and their task manager isn’t showing a bunch of bloat, then it’s 95% of the time a hardware issue.
Or how to fix your printer.
Nobody knows how to fix a printer
Did you know they still sell dot matrix printers? Wild.
Everything since then has been a mistake.
Best printer setup experience I’ve had.
I can’t even get my own printer to work.
I had a guy recently ask why his printer wasn’t working after he got a new router, and it turns out it is because the printer only went up to 802.11g. I’m pretty amazed that printer outlived the wireless standard it was using.
I mean… 802.11g is still able to be used. Even b is supported under the radios I’m familiar with.
The router he got did have support for 802.11g, but for some reason I don’t remember we couldn’t turn it on. It was some integrated 5G router. The solution was just to use the printer’s built in AP to print. He has to disconnect from the internet to print things, but it still works.
“Can you hack my ex-girlfriends Instagram?”
Or, “I have an amazing idea for an app…”
I can’t hack insta. But I can probably hack your ex. Spearfishing is largely just a matter of time.
Clearly, if my years on the internet taught me anything, the killer app ID is an app that hack’s ex’s socials with bonus functionality for changing their school grades
My app idea was location based reminders instead of time based.
The next time you’re at the store you’ll get a notification with your notes.
I think it’s a neat idea but i never have location on so 🤷♂️
Apple Reminders does that.
Was gonna say Google keep has had this feature for years too
very cool
I think you can use existing software to do that. If your store has wifi (even if you can’t access it, I think), you can geofence an area and have some action (such as popping up a reminder app) trigger. I’ve not used software like this myself, but I remember people describing behavior like this at least on Android. If it might be useful to you, you should give it a search.
I have an app that’s meant to schedule things, but I just use it as a checklist and preface each action with the location. So long as I check it (second home screen on my phone, so not a huge barrier), I’m usually good.
Example
- costco: chicken
- costco: paper towels
- Cainz: sunscreen
- grocery: milk
- grocery: eggs
yeah quite a few apps are existing software wrapped into a convenient bundle
“My app idea is that you can see where your girlfriend is at all times.”
“So you’re telling me you want me to build an illegal stalking system? Have you really thought this through?”
(Based on an actual conversation.)
Also, that software engineer and IT are not interchangeable terms
“I’m a software engineer, not a printer whisperer”
^ This. So much this. I’m a software engineer, and people will ask me IT questions about software I have no clue how to use.
Yeah, but what could it be though?
Eh, you probably do, you just don’t want to spend three hours wading through mountains of malware for free.
I don’t want to do it for money either.
I mean, 90% chance it’s because: still using a hard drive, old ass CPU/heat issues+throttling, OS and software bloat.
And they need to download more RAM
Bloat
The cloud is just someone else’s computer
Next you’ll be telling me Serverless is just code on servers!
But someone who is better at managing computers than 99% of people.
Debatable.
But that someone will have their own priorities that will most likely not always coindice with yours.
This.
Yes, but just by being a conscious that a screen turned off doesn’t mean that the computer is unresponsive, and you still should have care to not smash keys blindly, already puts you on one of the higher branches.
Not if I’m Jeff Bezos.
Turning your computer off and back on again will solve 90% of your problems.
Of the other 10% an additional reboot while on the phone with the IT person solves those.
Yep, I turn off my devices when I’m done with them. I’ll restart my phone from time to time.
Most software isn’t made for patchwork while running. Sometimes even if it’s on a server lol. The stuff that is gets tested quite a bit.
Turning off and back on is not the same as restarting. If you want to force a restart like turn off, hold shift while clicking shutdown.
You have a very strange phone.
Sounds like the windows 10 ‘innovation’ called fast startup. Some genius decided instead of shutting down, let’s just log the user out and put the OS into standby… That’ll save a lot of boot time!
It’s universally hated by IT and made redundant by SSDs
I hear you I turn off Linux devices too. Zombie power is a thing as well as software being a house of cards.
Windows 8*
Also it really fucks with some peripherals. I even had a motherboard with RGB lights (don’t judge me, it was actually cheaper than the “normie” version I originally wanted) that didn’t turn off the lights and the fans because of this shitty feature. I never got around to investigating who was doing things wrong between Microsoft and the manufacturer in this case though, I just got into the habit of holding shift while clicking the shutdown button.
I can’t “blow up” an image you screenshotted from a video your sister posted on facebook and make it look any better then a pile of angry pixel garbage. I can, however, remove the pause icon from your garbage picture.
Well with generative AI, now we can, but that’s just cause the computer is making shit up.
To be fair, that’s also what our brains do most of the time.
It’s at least mostly going away nowadays, but…pulling a fire alarm will not make your school fire sprinklers go off. Getting one sprinkler to go off is just that. One sprinkler. None of the rest will go off.
Also, fires in a building are never a spot here, a spot there, over there a spot, and just randomly burning patches all over the place. It just grows out and up from its origin point, for the most part. It doesn’t magically plant little patches all over the place. It’s also often times so smoky and so thick with smoke that you quite literally couldn’t see a big portion of fire if it were ten feet in front of you. You feel the heat and maybe see a faint bit of orange glow. Sometimes you don’t even get to see that.
Learned something today. Thank you
Does this affect any fire evacuation procedures? For example, would it be likely that the nearest exit stairwell happens to be the source of the fire? If so, how would that change the plan?
Just google the error message. Copy, paste. Read the top 5 results.
No, click on the results and read the page.
Did you read it? Explain to me why it doesn’t work.
Still broken? Call the vendor.
Hello Google! Hey I was trying this function in Android and it’s not working. Plus when I search the first link is to your bug tracker and it’s marked as non fix.
What do you mean this is a Wendy’s? What do you mean that’s a free product and there’s no support?
Nothing about game development is “easy”
I remember my university orientation so vividly, because I was sat next to several people that were taking the “Game Development” degree. They spent the entire orientation talking about what consoles they brought with them.
Two weeks later, they were all gone. The course was arguably harder than my CS course, based on some of the required classes they had to take. I think the dropout rate over the full degree was ~90%. CS was high, sure, but barely anyone actually graduated with the Game Development degree.
Game dev is hard, and I’m yet to meet a game dev that didn’t bemoan how utterly ruthless it was.
The 0.01 alpha fun to build test version is :-D
Yeah, the carefree mood of preproduction is definitely the best part
If you want your chicken extra crispy, it takes longer.
I can’t and wouldn’t teach your kid to be gay. I can’t get him to write his fucking name at the top of the page.
Rough day, huh?
Parents can be overprotective, (I.e. become shitty parents) and you can’t really do anything about that, except hoping that the universe educate them.
That’s generally not what they’re really concerned about. “I don’t want teachers teaching my children to be gay” is just code for, “I don’t want teachers teaching my children that it’s ok to be gay.”
Or just tolerating them in front of their kid. In fact, they’d probably prefer the teacher teach Timmy to hate like mom and dad do.
I hate that more people don’t understand this. It leads to a bunch of discussion and anxiety about nothing at all.
